Sunday, October 20, 2013

I saw a tweet about October 23 being National Mole Day,
which served to remind me that I’ve still not done a take on this magical
Mexican sauce. The video below is from my friends at Allrecipes.com, and looks
like a great place for me to start my experiments.

By the way, as I searched for more info on how National Mole
Day came to be, I realized it wasn’t “Mole” the sauce; it was actually “Mole”
the scientific unit of measure. Now, why would scientists name a unit of
molecular weight after this delicious Mexican sauce? Anyway, enjoy the video (you can see the written recipe here),
and if you have any secret mole-making knowledge, feel free to pass it along. Enjoy!

When I studied chemistry I learned that the the word "guacamole" is a combination of the word "guaca" which means Avogadro's constant in Spanish, and the word "mole", meaning sauce. It has totally replaced the term "gram-molecule" except when making certain pie crusts or S'mores.

Mole has five constituent parts: chiles, nuts & seeds, fruits, aromatics & spices, and thickeners. The first four are usually prepared separately, combined in stages, with the thickeners added at the end.

Basically you cook/brown each part, make a puree (often strained), reduce slowly, and repeat with the next stage, adding it to the previous preparation in a big simmering pot. This maximizes all the flavors and slowly alters the character of the mole as it cooks together.

You can use lots of different ingredients. For the fruits I've seen roasted plantain added to the tomatoes and tomatillos. Besides peanuts, there's toasted almonds, pecans, and pepitas (hulled green pumpkin seeds) which are great. Other spices include oregano, star anise and black pepper. In Mexico they tend to use peloncillo instead of white sugar, but brown or demerara sugar works too.

You also need three or four abuelitas with nothing better to do than hang out in the kitchen all day cooking mole. It's very time consuming, but also well worth the effort.